The wind atop the Needle wasn't wind.
It was a scalpel.
It peeled. It stripped. It knew no mercy, only precision—an altitude so sharp it shaved warmth from skin, bone, and thought itself.
Valerius stood alone on Embermark's upper bastion, where granite buckled against a sky long divorced from earth. His silhouette cut sharp against cloud-split dusk—cloak woven from dusk-silk, threads of embersteel hissing where the wind dared but failed to touch him.
Behind him, the bastion's teeth rose—rust-eaten skyhooks, collapsed signal pylons, iron groaning beneath centuries of weight. Beneath, the city writhed—a wounded leviathan fed by smoke and gears, bled dry by industry.
His robes drank the failing light. Glyph-threads shimmered across hems—molten script in a dialect only power remembered. These glyphs were not ornament; they watched. They remembered. They bit.
Valerius inhaled.
Scorched brass. Crushed coal. The copper sting of living flesh turned useful.
Far below, the Verge screamed.
Kilns vomited slag into fire gutters. Chain gangs dragged smoldering conduits. Sparks flared skyward, brief stars swallowed by hungry air. The forges did not sing. They howled.
A city does not breathe.
A city burns.
Behind Valerius, his honor guard stood in perfect symmetry. Not men. Not entirely. Armor fused with sigils branded into flesh. No faces—only burnished helms reflecting others' insignificance. Names irrelevant. Purpose obedience.
A pulse ticked at his wrist—brass, bone, breath-bound Akar. A Shaper's timepiece. Inside, a drop of Timed-Akar pulsed with mechanical certainty.
Right on cue.
The sky tore.
Not thunder. Not storm. Something deliberate.
Air folded in on itself—creased, inverted, stitched by unseen hands. Light warped, trembling between here and other physics, other will.
Out of the rupture came the Sky-Leviathan.
It did not fly. It authored its presence.
Vast, glistening, forged of cyclonic glyphwork and armored chitin glossed like obsidian glass. Its wings were pressure events, folded jetstreams threaded with spinning script. Glyphs not written or etched, but sung.
Aeridorian. Alien. Perfect.
Embermark's glyphs were carved—scarred into brass, tattooed on flesh. Crude things. This was something else. These glyphs moved, shifting fractal symmetries refusing stillness—alive, recursive, self-editing with every beat of the sky.
The Leviathan did not land. It commanded the air to yield.
Stone shuddered. Metal bent—but no dust rose. Valerius' warding lattice flickered—transparent nets of force bending atmosphere, slicing wind into ribbons. Nothing touched him without permission.
A stair unfolded from the Leviathan's gut—spun air and compressed momentum, a spiral of obedient turbulence.
And down came Lady Caedra.
Ninth Wind-Blood of House Vaelenar. One of the Skyborne.
Her feet never touched stone. Glyph-woven currents cupped her steps, cradling her in an altitude Embermark could not claim. Her robes shimmered with colors stolen from cloudbreak and lightning—hues no mapmaker inked, no forgemaster could replicate.
Glyphwork on her sleeves flowed like liquid grammar—sampling wind, tasting intent.
The air bent lighter around her.
"Sahven da'el vaeren, Khair Valeriyan."
The greeting coiled like silk woven from storm-breath.
Valerius dipped his head. Exactly fourteen degrees—no more, no less. Protocol. Dominance dressed as respect. "Lady Caedra. May your winds remain steady." His accent broke the cadence—Embermark's tongue was brick and iron. No melody.
She wasted no words.
Her gaze slid past him, down the ledge where cages waited.
Bolted into cliff-face like parasites—each wrapped in suppression glyphs glowing cruel red. Runes designed not just to bind, but to humiliate. To strip identity. To render Akar inert.
Fifty-two souls.
Not prisoners. Not citizens. Not lives.
Ingredients.
Valerius gestured. "Fifty-two. As agreed. The condemned. Freshly marked."
Caedra floated forward. Escorts trailed—ink-skinned, robe-clad. No metal. No weapons. Their bodies were weapons. Glyphs tattooed into muscle and marrow, patterns so complex Embermark's Warden-mages would go blind trying to read them.
Her gaze skimmed cages. Dispassionate. Academic.
Until—
She paused.
One form. Slumped but unbowed. Blood crusted at his brow. Wrists ringed with bruises deep enough to be permanent. His head raised—not defiance, not submission. Something else.
Recognition.
Lugal.
A half-faded glyph marked his shoulder—Forum Intelligence. Clearance once high enough to open vaults full of secrets most cities buried under blood and salt.
A man who once spoke heresy aloud. Whispered of climbing beyond the Ancients. Breaking the pattern. Defining a power with no name.
Valerius almost smiled. Almost.
"Power shouldn't calcify. It should evolve."
He remembered the day Lugal said it. The silence that followed. The Forum's chairs had smiled. But not kindly.
Now, here he was. Not evolved. Not ascended. Just caged.
Caedra's hand lifted. Her nearest Wielder stepped forward—tattoos spiraling in motion, skin gleaming with humidity as glyphwork activated.
He carried no weapon. Just an orb.
Inside, liquid glyphs writhed like serpents drowning in molten brass.
"Vael'danir," she commanded.
The orb pulsed. Released threads of motion too subtle for Embermark eyes. Currents probed Lugal—tasting the weave of his soul, sampling fracture lines in his pattern.
The Leviathan's hull shimmered in response. Glyphs blinked approval.
The Wielder nodded once. "Vasya."
Acceptable. Useful.
Valerius inclined his head. "Curious. Still has teeth."
Caedra's expression never shifted. But her gaze lingered too long. On Lugal. On something inside him.
Then—the cages unlocked. Glyphwork hissed open. Shackles slithered like obedient iron serpents.
The condemned lifted—one by one—into aeroweave cradles, glyph-threaded windwood stitched for captivity. They floated upward—limp, broken, necessary.
Among them—a girl. Wide-eyed. Untagged. Unclaimed. A mistake no one would bother correcting.
Her gaze flicked—searching. Not for rescue. Just… looking.
Lyra.
Valerius didn't know the name. Names weren't the point. She was potential. Untested. Unwitnessed. A spark folded into fuel.
He stepped forward. Watched her vanish into the Leviathan's belly. A future written out of the world like a wrong sentence.
Behind him, a robed servant approached—offering a silk-lined case. Valerius peeled it open. Three Akar-crystals nested inside—still warm, still pulsing with echo.
He lifted one. Small. The light inside trembled.
Female. Young. Raw.
A perfect yield.
The Leviathan flared—wings folding, air groaning, clouds pushed aside as though embarrassed to exist in its presence.
Then—silence.
Fifty-two gone. Folded into sky.
Valerius stood alone. His robes shifted in a wind that was not weather, but aftermath.
"Let the sky take them."
"Let the mines feed."
"Let the ash forget."
He turned the crystal in his palm. Watched the glow dim.
A heartbeat. Trapped. Archived. Forgotten.
Embermark endures.
Because men like him ensure that it does.